At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe “King” Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century on, from the hothouse stomps of Duke Ellington to the angular doodlings of Thelonious Monk, jazz survives as an important musical voice of America.

Duke Ellington’s America by Harvey G Cohen

Ellington was the first jazz composer of real distinction. No other bandleader so consistently redefined the sound and scope of jazz. As a classically trained pianist he fused the hot, syncopated sounds of Jazz Age Harlem with an element of dissonance to produce something unique: a dance music of trance-inducing charm, originality and attack.

Hailed as the “African Stravinsky”, Ellington was born in 1899 in black, middle-class Washington. During the mid-Twenties he was absorbed in the African American arts movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. In Harlem, wealthy white thrill-seekers would dance to “jungle” music at the Cotton Club and bump up against the ragtime of tin-pan pianos. Ellington, suspicious of white tastes for Uncle Tom minstrelsy, forged his own dignified version of the new black sound.

In Duke Ellington’s America, a scholarly appreciation of the composer and his times, Harvey Cohen chronicles the “Harlemania” that took hold in Twenties New York. Drawing on a wealth of press cuttings and interviews, he argues that Ellington was motivated always by a belief in black self-empowerment.

Harlem, of course, had no segregated streetcars or unfriendly, white-owned stores, yet the Cotton Club’s policy of excluding poor blacks offended Ellington. Rather than protest or engage in a Garveyite agenda for black redemption, he chose instead to celebrate the African American experience through music. He did so independent of wealthy Fifth Avenue patronage; by creating a single appreciative audience from both black and white, however, Ellington was a “trailblazing and important” figure, Cohen argues.

Black celebrities such as Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson who angrily denounced racism in Thirties and Forties America soon found themselves out of work. Ellington understood this. His insistence on elegant attire for his band was part of a plan to create a parallel world on a par with that of the white man.

Ellington’s air of urbane, at times condescending, regality helped to instil an image of racial pride in the American mind, Cohen maintains. After concerts he would routinely remove from his dressing gown portions of a roast chicken elegantly wrapped in silk handkerchiefs. “Does anyone wish to dine?” Beneath this suave irony was a gently subversive spirit, says Cohen, which served the Duke well in times of “Jim Crow” prejudice.

In mesmeric detail, Cohen charts the course of Ellington’s music from the 1927-31 Cotton Club hits (The Mooche, Creole Rhapsody) to his wartime spiritual opus Black, Brown and Beige. Even as the Swing Era waned, Ellington continued to thrill. At the Newport jazz festival in 1956 his band played so rip-roaringly well that the audience clamoured for more. The Sixties and Seventies – a golden age for Ellington – saw the bracing jazz exoticism of the Far East Suite and The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.

Even in old age Ellington remained a restlessly innovative spirit, impatient of conformity. He died in 1974, at the age of 75, a magician of the contemporary scene.

By the time the pianist and composer Thelonious Monk hit the scene in 1940, jazz was increasingly a white man’s music played by blacks. The clarinettist Benny Goodman had adapted the old Cotton Club rhythms for white tastes, toning them down, cleaning them up – much as Elvis Presley would do for the post-war generation. With his choppy time signatures and quirky chords, Monk straddled the pre-war swing of Ellington and the post-war bop-derived avant-garde.

In this absorbing biography of Monk, Robin Kelley hails an American “original”, whose piano playing resonated with influences ranging from Mississippi washboard rhythms to the virtuoso riffing of Charlie Parker. In his porkpie hat, goatee and dark glasses, Monk became a caricature jazznik (“Mad Monk”), as well as a byword for compositional weirdness. Yet Ellington loved him, and the admiration was reciprocated. In 1955, Monk recorded an album of Ellington covers.

The best jazzmen had all learnt to keep rhythm in church, and Monk was no exception. In Twenties New York his mother “Boo Boo” (Barbara) Monk taught him piano in a local black Baptist church. Later, Monk’s off-kilter, plinky piano took on a melancholic, minor-key sound that mirrored the Revivalist religiosity of black America. (“Jazz is America musically,” Monk liked to say.)

For all his perceived eccentricity, Monk today sounds haunting and timeless, his precisely weighted piano chords wondrously sparse and lyrical. All his adult life he suffered from depression, however, and the anxieties accumulated darkly around him even as he took lithium. The hushed intensity and strangeness of the music (Round Midnight, Ruby, My Dear) is lovingly documented here.

Ian Thomson’s The Dead Yard: a Story of Modern Jamaica won the Ondaatje Prize 2010